They’re crowded together on a street, 11 arbiters of cool, piled in denim and leather and sunglasses and carefully draped scarves. Only one of them is smiling.

That’s the front of the card. On the back, in bright-pink script, is the word that started all the trouble.

“Privilege,” it says. And in smaller letters: “An exclusive social experiment.”

“The word was uplifting to us,” said Alexia Winfield, 27.

“It’s still uplifting to us,” said Jermaine Jenkins, 33.

The two — the founders of Privilege — felt that way, but plenty of other people in Columbus didn’t. Some saw the word and decided that Privilege — whatever it was, because that wasn’t immediately clear — needed to be torn apart.

“Columbus doesn’t really support elitism or the assumption of elitism,” said Cheryl Harrison, a local blogger, marketer and social-media pro, noting the failure of area members-only clubs. “We have to bring each other up because no one else is going to do it.”

And so not long after Jenkins, Winfield and Marlon Anthony, 26, got their idea to host social events connecting creative types in the community, and just after they threw their first such party on Feb. 7 in a German Village bar, the people of the Internet weighed in on this new venture.

“Seriously?”

“Artsy fashionistas make an ‘exclusive’ social club and act all douchey about it as if it’s the best thing ever.”

“Ah, the snobby rich kids from high school finally found a way to make themselves feel relevant again!”

“The pictures look like it is 1984.”

“Ew.”

Those weren’t even the mean comments. For a time, #Privilege614 was trending on Twitter in large part because people were mocking it. One group even marketed its own event as the anti-Privilege party.

Harrison linked to the Privilege website and tweeted: “So (this) is a joke right?”

“It just felt kind of off that you would call an organization ‘privileged,’ ” she said.

When the backlash died down, Winfield, Jenkins and Anthony sat down to dig through what happened.

They say they’re just three friends looking to cultivate a lifestyle, to gather trend-setters and taste-makers, to create some kind of social environment of art and fashion and food and music. They called their venture Privilege, as in a rare opportunity to gather to celebrate creativity and diversity. People who wanted to be involved had to email them for an invitation, and plenty did — 300 people came to their first event, twice what they’d expected.

“We were up in the clouds,” Winfield said.

Then came the ridicule. A few critics seemed particularly focused on the lip color Winfield wore to the event. Someone called her a “Blue Lipstick Muppet.”

Winfield finally took to the Privilege website: “What I can see now is that some of the harshest comments came from people who felt like they were taking stabs at a bully,” she wrote. “Privilege in their mind represented an elitist clique and they took us to task, I can understand that.”

She asked people to email her, to join her, to steer the movement in a better direction. Winfield, Jenkins and Anthony said they’re not abandoning Privilege. “We created something that we feel is dope and epic,” Jenkins said. “I’m pretty sure when we have the next one, it’s going to get kicked up again.”